Fausto Boop writes

“Thanks a whole lot truly significantly. It helped! At the quite least we ultimately realized that which was taking location!”

I’m thinking about putting together a page full of rave reviews of this blog from spiderbots. The combination of relentlessly upbeat and absolutely hollow affirmations with Engrish as She is Spoke is a constant source of joy to me.

It’s a program written to traverse (crawl) web pages, to gather information or do tasks automatically. They can be used for legitimate purposes, e.g. a search engine crawling pages to mine for keywords, or less than legitimate purposes e.g. crawling pages for email addresses so you can spam everybody about your cheap Chicom wonder drugs.

http://catholiccinephile.wordpress.com/ Evan

I once saw one from “Shelli Zipf” saying: “You are my inhalation , I have few web logs and occasionally run out from to post .” Yes, the punctuation was spaced like that.

Mark Shea

“You are my inhalation”. It’s like poetry.

casey

sounds like a highly intoxicated jar jar binks.

http://www.lukeshea.com/ Luke Shea

I am so delighted by this.

ds

You might not luah so much at poor Fausto’s name if you knew it was pronounced “Beau-Op”

Marthe Lépine

Actually, this reads like a translation done automatically with so-called translation software. If you want to spend a little time on a game, try replacing most of the words in the sentence with synonyms. For example, “that which was taking location” with “what was taking place”. In Canada, francophones like myself often have good laughs while reading that kind of translation on products (usually) made in China. Like the time when I saw a package of paper meant to be used to line drawers, “drawer liners”, where the box in fact said in French: “paquebot pour tiroir”, using another perfectly good French word to translate “liner”, when it is about a large boat, but just in the wrong context.

Marthe Lépine

P.S. Tentative translation of the sentence: “Thank you very much. It certainly helped. At least, we were able to figure out what was taking place.”

http://austrolibertariancatholic.wordpress.com Martial Artist

I am reminded of the story (apocryphal?) related by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, about a translation experiment.

The experiment employed two native speakers of Japanese, each not known to the other, who worked as translators between Japanese and English. The first translator was brought into an office and given the following English expression to translate into Japanese: “Out of sight, out of mind.” When he had completed the task he was paid and sent on his way, task accomplished. Subsequently, at a later time, the second translator was brought into the same office, handed the paper on which the first translator had written in Japanese, and was asked to translate it into English. The result of the second translation was “Invisible idiot.”

Pax et bonum, Keith Töpfer

Oregon Catholic

Oh, I love that anecdote. I have such admiration for people that can not only learn another language but become fluent in the idioms and cultural references as well. It’s not easy.

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